Omar Z. Robles is a Puerto Rican photographer who successfully integrated his love for photography and background in mime theatre with another beautiful art: ballet.

Now, he’s based in a city he’s always dreamed of visiting: New York. Robles cleverly uses the hustle and bustle of the Big Apple as a backdrop for his stunning photography.

Capturing dancers poised midair — like they’re in flight — along New York’s busy streets, performing pirouettes and pliés in the middle of traffic, Robles sets a delicate balance between grit and grace.

“Like mime theater, photography [is] an amazing nonverbal communication medium,” Robles explains. “Yet it allowed [me] to capture fleeting emotions and tell a story for a much longer time than mime theater could.”

Robles tells mesmerizing visual tales, with the ballerinas and ballerinos being the perfect characters in his stunning plot.

“Ballet dancers make us feel as if their movements were truly effortless,” he gushes. “This while pushing their bodies to the very extreme of what is humanly possible. It is that grace and elegance which mesmerizes us.”

Through rainstorms and heavy traffic, the dancers twist and twirl with unbelievable weightlessness, held down by neither the chaotic surroundings nor the harshest of natural elements.

Robles isn’t afraid of injecting variety into his ever-developing photographic collection. He allows his artistry to frolic in all directions, but always moving towards one vision: “to break the norm of the everyday, to shatter the monotony of our way of life and portray a world where we could move without the stiff rules of etiquette.”